by Annie Groves
‘I’m going on leave tomorrow morning, but when I come back I intend to make sure that the rest of us put our backs into reversing the damage Mouse has done to us all. Not that there will be any public reference to it. The powers that be can’t afford to have it get into the newspapers that a serving member of the ATS was so lacking in backbone that she took her own life. The people of this country need to believe in the strength of the Government and those who represent it, which in a small way we in the ATS do. We all have our loyalty to our friends, of course, but our first and greater loyalty is to the ATS and to this country, and any girl who forgets that fact is not fit to serve in uniform, in my opinion.’
Sam was still too much in shock to say anything.
‘Personally,’ Hazel continued, ‘I think it’s a great shame that the MO didn’t dismiss her as unfit for service right from the start, but I’ve been given to understand that when the matter was raised with her she pleaded not to be sent home and to be given a second chance.’
Finally Sam managed to struggle through her shock to defend her friend. ‘You know how Toadie bullied poor Mouse.’
‘What I know is that a member of my dormitory has done something that is unforgivable, and I would suggest you now need to think a bit more about others and a lot less about one silly weak young woman,’ Hazel told her. ‘By taking her own life, Mouse could undermine the morale of other girls here. That can’t be allowed to happen. The services aren’t about individuals and their needs, Sam, they’re about the whole service working together to save our country.’
Sam looked blindly at the wall. She had thought of Hazel as a chum, but the way she was talking made Sam feel like an outsider and very alone.
‘I did try to warn you about not getting too involved with Mouse. Of course your loyalty to a friend is understandable but, like I’ve just said, that kind of loyalty must never come before your loyalty to the ATS and to our country,’ Hazel warned her sternly. ‘Surely you can see the harm it would do, not just to those of us billeted here, but to the whole of the ATS if one of its number were to start making accusations that the actions of an officer led to a girl taking her own life. I’m not just speaking to you as a corporal, Sam. I like you; you’re made of the right stuff.’
‘You want me to lie to protect Toadie.’
Hazel shook her head. ‘Have you thought of what will happen to you if other statements are taken, which they will be, and they do not tally with your own? I’ve already heard girls saying that they suspected that Mouse was unbalanced and inclined to be hysterical. I’ve even heard talk of some girls having heard her say openly that she intended to take her own life. I heard her say myself that she no longer wanted to go on living.’
‘She did say that, but that didn’t mean … She was just upset … I can’t believe you’re saying any of this.’
‘It’s for your own good. Like I said, I like you, Sam, and I’d hate to see you take a fall out of misplaced loyalty to a girl who we all know was not really mentally fit to be in uniform.’
Hazel got up from the bed. ‘Sleep on what I’ve said, Sam, and I’m sure that in the morning you’ll see the sense of taking the captain’s advice.’
‘I have to tell the truth.’
Hazel walked towards the door and then stopped and turned round. ‘But are you really sure you know what the truth is? Have you really not understood what I’m trying to tell you? Sam, if you don’t take the captain’s advice, if you persist in sticking to your own story, do you really think it would get any further than the captain’s desk? You can’t buck the system, Sam. You’ll be labelled a troublemaker, and your life will be made a misery, and for what? You can’t bring Mouse back; no one can do that. Once you’re in uniform you have to live by the rules of that uniform, harsh though that may sound. It’s like being in a family, Sam; if one member of that family does something that will bring disgrace on the family, it’s hushed up and kept quiet; it becomes a secret that everyone knows about but no one admits to or talks about – especially to those outside the family. That’s the way it is in the Armed Forces. Sometimes one of the hardest lessons we have to learn is that the reality of life is very different from our ideals.’
She opened the door, and then added quietly, ‘Oh, by the way, you may not have heard yet but the captain has authorised me to tell you that Warrant Officer Sands received an overseas posting yesterday, and will be leaving us at the end of the week.’
Alone in the darkened room Sam desperately wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come.
TWELVE
‘Saw the doctor bringing you back from the hospital the other day,’ Ida Jessop, one of Sally’s neighbours, stopped her in the street to comment with obvious relish.
‘Yes,’ Sally agreed. Not for the world was she going to start gossiping about that thunderbolt of a statement Dr Ross had made to her before he had left, and which was still so fresh in her memory even now, two days later. There had been a look in his eyes when he had said those words to her that had broken through her antagonism towards him and her awareness that they inhabited socially different worlds.
‘Doris was saying that it was them sandwiches of Daisy’s that caused your lad to be ill.’
‘The doctor couldn’t say what had caused it,’ Sally answered her diplomatically.
‘Hmm, well, as to that, none of us know the truth of half of what goes on, if you ask me. Look at all that talk there’s bin about this national loaf. None of us know what’s bin put in it.’
‘No, I dare say not,’ Sally agreed.
‘Well, I’d best be on my way. I’d heard that they’ve got biscuits at the grocer’s up in Wavertree. Not that I’m registered there, but seeing as how I’ve got service people billeted on me …’
Sally had gone only a few more yards when she was stopped again, this time by Daisy, who came out of her front gate and crossed the road to come and stand in front of her, crossing her arms as she did so.
‘I want a word with you,’ she told Sally sharply.
‘I can’t stop now, Daisy,’ Sally began. ‘I’m already late—’
‘What’s all this I’ve been hearing about you going round telling everyone that it was my sandwiches wot made that lad of yours sick?’ Daisy demanded, ignoring her plea.
‘Daisy, that isn’t true,’ Sally defended herself.
‘Isn’t it? So how come everyone keeps going on to me about it?’ she asked bitterly. ‘Get my hubby into a real load of trouble, it could, and all over a kiddie being a bit sick.’
‘Tommy was more than just a bit sick, Daisy,’ Sally felt bound to point out. ‘As it happens, Dr Ross did go on at me to say where I had the fish paste from—’
‘What’s it got to do wi’ him? It’s all right for rich folk like him, but the rest of us have to make do and mend as best we can, and if my hubby can help folk out by letting ’em have a few extra tins of stuff now and again, then why shouldn’t he? If you was to ask me I’d say that the only reason them like ruddy Dr Ross want to know things like that is because they want to keep all the decent stuff for themselves. My hubby says you should see what he’s heard comes through the docks that we never get to see in the shops. So what if some of the boxes fall off the pallets by accident on purpose so that the men can have ’em as spoiled? What harm’s that doing anyone, may I ask?’
Sally could understand Daisy’s feelings but she still felt bound to point out, ‘Dr Ross was telling me that there’d been cases of people dying from eating bad food, and that’s why he wanted to know where the fish paste had come from. I didn’t want to get your hubby into any trouble so I didn’t let on about him getting it.’
‘Well, you may have told him that but you’ve certainly made sure everyone round here knows different. My hubby had a nice little business going selling off them tins that we didn’t want and now he’s got people wot were keen to buy from him turning up their noses and saying they don’t want it in case it makes them bad.’
Sally was beginnin
g to lose her patience. ‘Well, that isn’t my fault, is it?’
‘It’s your kiddie that got took bad,’ Daisy pointed out illogically, adding angrily, ‘That’s what happens when you get strangers moving into a street. We was all good friends round here and understood what was what before this war broke out and you come here. My hubby was saying only last night to him what lives three doors down that he feels right sorry for your hubby, stuck in a prisoner of war camp, whilst his wife goes out of a Saturday night.’
‘I go out to work,’ Sally protested.
‘Oh, aye, of course you do, and what about that chap that comes round here at night? Don’t think that we haven’t seen him. Regular as clockwork, he is. My George reckons you could set your watch by him. But we haven’t gone running round telling everyone that’ll listen all about it,’ Daisy finished, giving an angry toss of her head.
‘You don’t understand,’ Sally protested, white-faced with distress.
‘Don’t make me laugh. Of course we understand. Your husband’s bin taken prisoner fighting for his country whilst you’ve bin messing around wi’ another fella. It’s as plain as the nose on my face. It wouldn’t surprise me if he was the one that made your Tommy sick.’ With this parting shot she turned on her heel and marched back to her own house, leaving Sally standing watching her in shocked dismay.
One of the things that had touched her most after she and Ronnie had got married was the warmth with which his friends had welcomed her into their lives. She had felt more at home here in Liverpool than she had ever felt in Manchester, and she had cherished the friendships she had made, and the place in the community that belonged to her and her family. But now, with a few angry words, Daisy had destroyed all of that, making her feel like an outcast.
*
‘You OK?’
It was the first sympathetic voice Sam had heard since Mouse’s death and that it should belong to Sergeant Brookes made Sam’s eyes blur with tears as she nodded and pretended to be busy checking items on the list she was holding.
‘I heard about your friend.’
Sam dropped the list.
‘She was a decent kid,’ the sergeant said as he bent down to pick it up for her.
‘You’d better not let the ATS hear you saying that.’ Sam gave a bitter laugh. ‘They want everyone to say that she did it because she was unbalanced, but that’s not the truth. She killed herself because of what was being done to her by someone else, making her life a misery, even if I have had to give a statement saying different. I can’t stop thinking about her,’ she admitted. ‘I should have been there. If I had then I’d have been able to talk to her, make her see … and she’d be alive now.’
‘You can’t go thinking like that, or blaming yourself.’
‘Why not?’ The lessons she had learned since Mouse’s death had stripped her of the soft naïvety of idealism and the ability to trust in the system, and it showed in her voice. She was still raw with bitterness and shock.
‘You couldn’t have stopped her. I’ve come across folk like her myself. You learn a lot in the army, meet all sorts you’d not normally meet, and every now and again there’ll be one like her, in the wrong place at the wrong time, out of step and scared sick, and being turned on by them as should know better. It’s a fact of human nature and you can’t do nothing about it.’
Tears stung Sam’s eyes. At last Mouse was getting the sympathy Sam had expected her to receive from the other girls. Now that she was with someone who wasn’t being critical and who seemed to understand, the emotions Sam had been bottling up came pouring out in a torrent of anguish.
‘I feel I’m being so disloyal to Mouse, but the other girls – I had no idea they felt the way they do. I thought they sympathised with her like I did. But now when I think about it, well, some of them were unkind about her. Not as unkind or cruel as … someone was to her.’ Sam caught herself up, almost having said the warrant officer’s name. That, she knew, would draw down on her own head the sergeant’s disapproval. Not for nothing was there a military saying: ‘no names, no pack drill,’ which loosely translated that if one never gave one’s own name nor mentioned another’s, then no formal punishment could ever be given to you or to them. ‘Pack drill’ was army slang for a punishing cross-country run carrying one’s full kit in a haversack or, even worse, bricks, if the ‘crime’ was thought to merit such a punishment.
‘Taking it out on you now, are they? Your mates? Lasses can be like that sometimes.’
‘A bit,’ Sam answered cautiously. ‘A couple of the girls from another dormitory have already sent me to Coventry. Not that that bothers me,’ she assured the sergeant spiritedly. ‘They were her spies and hangers-on so they were bound to be on her side, but even the girls in my own dormitory aren’t the same to me any more,’ she admitted. ‘Mouse didn’t fit in and shouldn’t have joined the ATS, and now I’m beginning to think that I don’t fit in either. The other girls are angry with me and … I suppose I shall have to ask for a transfer, but who is going to want me with a black mark against my name?’ She paused and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.’
‘Why not? It will do you good to get it off your chest and I’m as good a listener as the next person.’
He was wrong about that, Sam decided. His kindness coming so unexpectedly after the lack of sympathy and even downright hostility towards Mouse and her own defence of her was almost too much for her, and she fought valiantly against a sudden prickle of tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she apologised again, searching frantically in her pocket for her handkerchief, accidentally removing with it one of the small pieces of fur she had retrieved from the floor of the warrant officer’s office. Automatically she bent down to retrieve it, but the sergeant got there first.
‘It’s from Mouse’s bear,’ she told him, her voice wavering, as her eyes filled with tears. And then somehow she was in his arms, being held tight and cradled comfortingly, in a manner that reminded her very much of the way her father had comforted her as a little girl. ‘I’m sorry … I’m sorry …’ was all she could say through her tears.
‘Cried my own eyes out, I did, after Dunkirk,’ he told her, ‘and I wasn’t the only one, I can tell you. Look, what you need, I reckon, is to be working somewhere where you haven’t got time to go dwelling on what’s happened. Somewhere where there’s a bit more happening.’
‘Sorry to interrupt, Frank, but we’ve got a bomb to dig out before it goes off and blows out half a street with it. How’s Molly, by the way? The baby’s due any day, isn’t it?’
The cold, curt and somehow accusatory words fell on Sam’s ears like physical blows, and she was sure she could hear discomfort as well as surprise in the sergeant’s voice as he exclaimed, ‘Johnny!’ immediately stepping back from her.
Released from the sergeant’s arms, her face on fire with discomfort, and those telling words about the sergeant’s responsibilities ringing in her ears, Sam took to her heels, disappearing as far into the murky depths of the store as she could. Not that she had been doing anything wrong, nor had wanted to do anything wrong. That female admiration she had been beginning to feel for Sergeant Brookes had been nipped in the bud the moment she had learned that he was married. He was a decent man, who she knew instinctively would never look at anyone other than his wife, and she simply would not have wanted him to look in her direction, knowing that he was married. She just wasn’t that sort.
It was Sergeant Everton’s attitude that had made her feel so uncomfortable, not anything she had been doing.
THIRTEEN
‘Charlie wants a word with you. He’s in the office.’
There was no reason for her to have that uncomfortable feeling of anxiety, Sally reassured herself. That smug triumph she had heard in Patti’s voice was just Patti being Patti.
She found the band leader in the small cluttered room at the end of the backstage corridor that everyone knew as ‘the office’. Short and balding, with his
patent black hair, which the girls swore was dyed, smoothed flat to his scalp, he looked like the good-natured family man he was. But there was no sign of his normal smile when she walked into the room, Sally noticed uneasily.
‘Patti said you wanted to see me.’
‘Yes … that’s right.’ He couldn’t look at her and instead was fidgeting with a piece of paper on the desk in front of him.
Sally’s small flutters of anxiety became a fist that squeezed her insides painfully tight.
‘Thing is, Sally, that … well, you’re a nice little singer, and I’ve been glad to have you doing a bit here and there and filling in for Eileen.’
‘A bit here and there?’ Sally protested. ‘I’ve bin singing for you as regular as any of the other girls these last few weeks, even if you haven’t bin paying me as though I was one of them.’
‘Well, you’ve hit the nail on the head there, Sally. You aren’t one of them, and the truth is that there’ve been complaints from the other girls about you taking advantage. I’ll be sorry to lose you, of course.’
He’d be sorry to lose her! It took several seconds for the meaning of his words to sink in.
‘You mean you don’t want me standing in for Eileen any more? But I thought … only the other week you said how good I was.’
‘Aye, well, things change, and to tell the truth I’ve bin thinking for a while that a trio would work better than a quartet. And with you having them kiddies and working at the factory—’
